The implied metaphysics of Daggerheart

Roleplaying games have implied settings. Daggerheart's is deliberately kept as sparse as possible, as it offers a plethora of game settings (“campaign frames”) and advice on using them or creating new ones to structure play. The pros and cons of the approach are obvious: maximal flexibility, minimal fallback.

That said, “Daggerheart has established ancestries, communities, classes, abilities, and spells – so some worldbuilding aspects will exist similarly across every campaign” (page 11). I'm setting my sights on what these imply about Daggerheart's metaphysics. What's stated? What can be inferred?

By metaphysics I mean cosmological, structural, and supernatural elements of the game world(s).

 

 

What can we learn?

I'm looking only at the Daggerheart core rulebook here. The “World Overview” in Chapter 1 is particularly informative. I'll give page references in other cases.

The Core Realms

The Mortal Realm is a plane, in the many-dimensions sense, and is where “the majority of material beings and objects” as well as the Faint Divinities are. Allegedly but not definitively, the Mortal Realm was created by the Forgotten Gods during the Earliest Age.

The Hallows Above is another core realm. It formerly belonged to the Forgotten Gods, and is now home to the New Gods.

The Circles Below are also called the “lower realms”. Many of the Forgotten Gods are banished there, becoming Fallen Gods. Allegedly but not definitively (a) “places of corruption, destruction, and violence”, and (b) the home to some of the most dangerous creatures in the core realms.

The Realms Beyond: The book is laid out as if these are the fourth of the core realms. However, the text implies that the Mortal Realm, Hallows Above, and Circles Below are the core realms, and that the Realms Beyond are some of the “many realms” of the overall cosmos.

The Realms Beyond include “the Elemental Lands, the Astral Realm, the Valley of Death, and countless others”. The “Chaos Realm” (page 250), an “otherworldly space where the laws of reality are unstable” is “alien to the Mortal Realm” and likely a Realm Beyond. It features impossible architecture and glimpses of other worlds. 

Gods and such

→ The Earliest Age was a time when immortals from the Hallows Above intermingled with mortals. Of nonspecific duration and distance other than “millennia” ago (pages 11, 235).

→ The Forgotten Gods were the first known gods. No mention of what they were called when they were in control – certainly not “Forgotten Gods”. They fought the New Gods and lost, and “many of” them were imprisoned either in the Mortal Realm or the Circles Below. Presumably the others were killed, but the ones “who fought most passionately” were the ones banished to the Circles Below, so there's room for interpretation that some of the losers were rehabilitated as New Gods.

→ The Fallen Gods are simply those of the Forgotten Gods banished to the Circles Below. Unlike in e.g. Christian mythology, nothing is implied to have changed about them in the process. Fallen Gods are designated (but are not objectively stated to be) “evil practitioners of tainted magic”, and their banished Faint Divinity allies (and their descendants) “demons”; Infernis descend in turn from demons. Temples to the Fallen Gods still exist (page 102), and it is possible to have a “direct channel” to them (page 106). Fallen Gods might also be encountered as an adversary (page 235); interestingly only at the same level of threat as “really muscular zombie” (page 239).

→ The New Gods turned up after the Forgotten Gods as a distinct set of entities, but it's unclear whether or not the war began immediately. They seized and colonised the Hallows Above. They still exist and can intervene in the world in set ways.

→ The Faint Divinities are “lesser deities created by both the Forgotten and the New Gods to oversee the Mortal Realm.” They have narrower spheres of influence but “can greatly influence the lives of mortals.” The main text does not actually say so, but many of the campaign frames place the Faint Divinities as being physically present in the Mortal Realm.

The gods' reach includes (page 44) the ability to “appoint” seraphs who are “imbued with sacred purpose” but whose ethos are only “traditionally” in alignment with their god's domain or goals. Some seraphs (page 236) are tasked with enforcing their god's will. Deities who appoint seraphs are those who exist “within the realms” [plural], which implies that seraphs can serve a Forgotten or Fallen God, or possibly even a Faint Divinity.

Interestingly, Daggerheart definitively has gods but does not seem to have an afterlife. The gods have specific observable qualities, and can be communicated with. There is no mention in the text of a heaven, hell, reincarnation, paradise, judgment, or such.

Aside: Resurrecting a dead character is merely “often” (i.e., not always) difficult and costly (page 106). Page 182 contradicts this, calling death “more permanent in Daggerheart than in other games of the same genre” and the Risk It All roll being “final unless you provide another means of resurrection in your story”; it also contradicts the wording of the Resurrection spell by claiming it can only be used once.

There's a definite impression that the Hallows Above and Circles Below are just places where gods happen to live, and not afterlives. Getting there takes specialist knowledge and an enormous investment while, crucially, being alive. The gods are more like super powerful alien beings than anything that maps well onto the belief patterns we have on Earth, but this is generally true for most fantasy TTRPGs.

Not much is set in stone about Daggerheart's gods, their powers, their domain, or the extent of the human-like qualities (agendas and personality traits) which the text hints at.

We do know that the gods are mortal – confusingly, given that they are several times called ‘immortal’ and juxtaposed to mortals. It is possible (page 250) to “breach the gates” of the Hallows Above or “break the barrier” between it and the Mortal Realm, slay one or more gods, and usurp their powers. The mortality of the gods is emphasised several times by the campaign frames (e.g., page 255).

Planar travel

Communication: The Hallows Above are “closely connected with most other realms” (page 11), and according to the text it's because of that cosmological feature (i.e., not because of some godly power or designed property) that “the gods residing here can see and speak with the creatures of the Mortal Realm without leaving their domain”. Communication with the gods may be obfuscated, although it's unclear if this is an interplanar limitation or a feature of the gods themselves.

Travel: There are specific methods by which the New Gods “can leave the Hallows Above to occupy other realms, but in the current age they must always sacrifice something of personal importance to do so.” According to rumour (not definitively), this was a deliberate choice to help protect the Hallows if the Forgotten Gods return.

There's an implied symmetry for entering the Hallows Above, and the requisite sacrifices have caused “some of the great calamities that have befallen the Mortal Realm in recent millennia.”

Accessing and traversing the Realms Beyond from the Mortal Realm “requires specialised knowledge and hard-learned skills”, possessed by some beings in the core realms.

Security: Other planes typically have “safeguards against Fallen [Gods?] who wish to cross from the Circles Below. Within the Mortal Realm, the use of arcane magic in acts of great evil is said to open a temporary rift between the two planes, allowing Fallen [Gods?] to pass through.”

 

Details of the magic system

Magic is “very powerful and incredibly dangerous” (page 12). It permeates the environment, and there is specifically a “magic of the wilderness” (page 30).

Magic can manifest within people (page 12). Some magic is innate and heritable (page 46). This kind of magic can be cultivated and there's a skill component to using it.

Magical power can be acquired and developed through learning, tool use, and taking supplements (page 50). Having knowledge of magic leads to, or correlates with, being able to use it. Secrets can be inherently powerful.

...Other than that, magic is largely left as a mystery. Daggerheart doesn't make commitments about its origin, ground rules, systematisation, relationship to divine powers, etc.

There's not much to glean from the domain cards. Many game powers labelled ‘ability’ rather than ‘spell’ seem nevertheless supernatural. Magic can be used to break the rules in all the classic ways (slow time, transmit information from the future, negate gravity, break space, directly change reality, create and destroy matter, etc). This ‘canonical’ collection of spells is constrained in various ways that would be visible in-world, e.g., in magnitude and locality, which is obviously a TTRPG design consideration.

Notes from the bestiary

Fantastical creatures, undead, and things like “waygates” and “incarnations of fate” exist without any specific metaphysical underpinnings. “Outer Realms” monsters are likely from Realms Beyond. There are also nature spirits that are mentioned repeatedly (pages 183, 230, 283, 338, 339).

Sapients

Where did people come from? According to “stories” the gods created the world (page 12), but that has little epistemic weight. It seems unlikely that people evolved biologically, given that there are eighteen subgroups of people that (a) have enormously varying physical biology (e.g. dragon breath, flight, drastically varying lifespan and size, being made of metal or fungus), (b) are all capable of having children together, and (c) have such similar brains that there is no variance between subgroups in mental characteristics or personality traits.

Aside: There is one exception to the latter. Humans specifically (page 65) “incorporate [sic] both magical and mechanical tools, accessories, and items that assist their daily life and tasks”, and “often dress to clearly display social status, wealth, personal faith, or aesthetics”. These traits are necessarily rare amongst the other seventeen kinds of people, otherwise they would not have been ascribed to humans in particular. Daggerheart separates culture and community from ancestry, so these are inborn traits of humans, not ones developed amongst insular human-dominated societies.

Daggerheart is otherwise very careful about this sort of thing (“individuals from all lineages possess unique characteristics and cultures, as well as personhood”) and notes that all people's minds work indistinguishably, i.e., in a fundamentally human way. I think we should therefore regard these notes on human ancestry as an outright error.

Either way, the ability of e.g. infernis, fungrils, and clanks to mix ancestries seems to preclude a model of biology similar to that of our reality. Of course, Daggerheart has deeply pervasive magic, so although the book doesn't state it, all such cases could be magically induced. This might anyway be a case of “game design considerations” rather than actual metaphysics of the setting.

Campaign frames

Chapter 5 doesn't really talk about modifying the metaphysics for a campaign frame (outside of mentioning unique setting distinctions and special mechanics).

Looking at the details of the cosmos mentioned in the book's campaign frames, we quickly find that (of those that get into it) they are built firmly on the implied metaphysics above, with little deviation.

The Age of Umbra (as laid out on pages 281, 284, 287, 288) and Colossus of the Drylands (as described as “myths” on pages 308–310) for example are each fundamentally compatible with Daggerheart's underlying metaphysics, but develop those basics in different directions.

The Witherwild

This frame reinforces the mortality of the gods, featuring a successful deicide (Shun’Aush) and giving a physicality to their powers (the bodily dust of a dead god gives rise to a plague; the god Nikta's two eyes are individually responsible for ripening and ruination; maiming a god changes their powers).

The Witherwild frame develops the Faint Divinities: “Gods in this land [...] wander the land as incarnate beings, residing in both the natural world as well as within homes and small villages. [...] Many communities, and some larger families, even have their own small god or tutelary spirit who watches over them. […] there is a constant push and pull between the goals of people and their deific neighbors. The gods must curry worship from mortals, often by performing small miracles [...]” Note that this is the only mention in the book of gods having any interest in being worshipped!

The Witherwild frame names six Faint Divinities (Fulg, Hyacynis, Ikla, Oove, Qui’Gar, Rohkin) and says there are hundreds or thousands more. Gods are person-like, with allies, alignments, and special interests. Interestingly, a god's domain is described not as a source of power or set of powers but somewhere that effort is required (Qui’Gar presides over deaths near brambles and the current magical verdancy has “made her job harder”).

 

Motherboard

This is the only canon campaign frame that arguably departs from the base metaphysics. In Motherboard, magic is ancient technology. There's a lot of reskinning necessary, with somewhat vague guidance: “Consider how these would manifest in a world where magic comes from technology, then adapt the flavour of each feature accordingly.”

Faint Divinities are ghosts in the machine. Regarding divine power, players “should determine why their character relates to technology on a spiritual level, rather than simply employing it. They should also consider if and how they offer their devotion to the Motherboard or Faint Divinities.”

The text falls short of saying that gods (and the Hallows Above, etc) don't literally exist in the Motherboard frame. But that's the more plausible and parsimonious reading: the Motherboard is a “master program” left behind by ancient technomancers, whose indistinguishable-from-magic advanced technology gives rise to all supernatural phenomena.

In conclusion

Daggerheart has magic, and lots of it. But it has no deep underlying rules for a GM to fall back on in rulings (or viewed the other way, no constraints that the GM has to work within). 

In Daggerheart, gods exist but at times seem curiously divorced from serving a religious purpose. There are only a few mentions of them being worshipped (e.g. page 313), and this isn't strictly required even for the chosen champions who channel their powers. There's no mention of an afterlife, moral judgment, or belief in gods other than the ones that literally exist. There's also no mention of god-oppositional philosophies, even though the Faint Divinities affect people's lives.

(As I wrote in “Put Flourishes, Fairy Tales, and Folk Beliefs in Your Fantasy World”, these are the kind of details you are definitely going to want to expand upon in your campaign frames.)

The four core realms are “the basis for the worldbuilding elements inherent to many of Daggerheart's mechanics” (page 12). The obvious question to ask now is: do Daggerheart's implied metaphysics constrain campaign frames?

Arguably. The book's frames are all built on those basics or agnostic to them. The game provides very little guidance for tinkering with the metaphysics, even as it weighs in on other analogous matters for creating your own world (in Chapters 3–4 and especially 5). On the other hand, there's lots of customise-it, revise-it, collaborate-on-it, reskin-it, make-it-work-for-your-group sentiment throughout Daggerheart, which could be extended to imply permission.

Discworld RPG: The setting

In this Octobereview, it's another look at the thick tome that is the Discworld Roleplaying Game (powered by GURPS), by Terry Pratchett and Phil Masters. Last time, I talked about the magic system.

This time, I'm reviewing all the setting stuff (pp 220-366)! Lands, environs, NPCs, scenarios, and so on.

I mentioned when I cracked this book open for the first Octobereview that there's really no winning in TTRPG book layout. To wit, this book splits its setting guide into a hefty Part 1 (in case you're unfamiliar with Discworld) and then comes back to it in Parts 6–11 (in case you're only somewhat familiar with Discworld). It's an inelegant split, but better than any alternative I could think of.

A lot actually happens from the start of a given Discworld book to the end, and although the chronology is muddled, there were substantial overall changes to the setting over the course of the series. The Discworld Roleplaying Game does a pretty good job of accounting for all the different points in time which players might play in.

Part 6: Life and Lands

I think PTerry had a particular Theory Of History And Society which shone through in his work. It's been interesting to see the GURPS authors' take on it. I think they do a pretty good job, with some exceptions.*

* For example, I wonder if re-framing dwarf vs troll conflict as being about 'vertical real estate' as the 'source of the problem', p. 228, was meant to have the undertones it has.

This chapter, p 220-267, is 'Life and Lands' information: a fairly thorough Discworld physical/cultural geography primer with very little game-specific content, just a minor 'adventuring lens'. It's all Discworld and not much game, so it's hard for me to evaluate its usefulness to the average GM.

All this could have come straight out of the Discworld Companion, and maybe it did. The book has diamond trolls emitting light (p 230), which I think is a misunderstanding. My only other note here is that the similarity of the phrases 'Octarine Grass Country' and 'Ultraviolet Grasslands' left me thinking about a crossover for a while.

Part 7: Ankh-Morpork

This continues being more 'setting overview' than 'gameplay aide'. I don't have much to say that wouldn't just reflect Discworld itself.

One rough spot shows on p 257, which lists a watchman's equipment. The GURPS rules say the watch officer will necessarily be at Light encumbrance or higher; the book takes pains to point out unencumbered PCs can therefore just run away from the watch. It advises that if they do, they can be penalised by running into specific Named Characters. The bottom line to me is that it's true of this fictional world that a watchman can't catch a fleeing perp (PC or NPC). That's a broken mechanic and the authors just chose to slap a crude patch on it.

I also spotted the very first typographical error after 259 pages of quite dense text: an extra comma in the 'orphans' box.* I used to be a copy-editor; that's a frankly superb hit rate. The whole book is very professionally made.

*A missed opportunity to do some extremely rare and on-the-nose grammatical irony.

A few other slips in the section were, I think, American writers not quite nailing British English, e.g., 'gasoline' for 'petrol' (p 270).

Part 8: Supernatural wotsits

This section offers a bit more advice about magic and its uses, including keeping PCs in line. Like the 'watchmen can't catch you' problem in Part 7 I think some of this should have been solved at its source instead of having a patch slapped on top.

There's discussions of gods and so on; not much in the way of game mechanics. A serviceable chapter.

Part 9: NPCs et al.

With NPCs we return (p 305) to the really GURPSy bits for the first time in a while. Here we get, for almost every major character in the series, either some abbreviated character attributes or a full GURPS character stat block.

We also get some advice for using canon characters in play, which amounts to "don't overdo it". Of course, it's damned-if-you-do,-damned-if-you-don't: the Disc books and humour are extremely character-driven. But as the Discworld RPG points out, hitting the right tone for a well-established, well-loved character from a different form of media is necessarily going to be difficult for pretty much any GM. If you're going to try it, this book is determined to give you 45 pages of stats to fall back on!

Part 10: Critters

We also get stats for Discworld animals – including the Disc 'versions' of regular animals (superintelligent camels, occult cats, sapient dogs) – and monsters.

There were some interesting choices about which beasts to include. Of the classic swords-and-sorcery slash-em-up monsters which show up in Discworld, very few are mentioned. Basilisks, yetis, ice giants, and the avatar of Bel-Shamharoth aren't statted up, to name a few. But some one-note, one-book, harmless and uninteresting creatures like curious squid are there.

Side note: It's always interesting to see how much an RPG values a horse. Especially, say, a warhorse vs a riding or draft horse. Historical warhorse sale prices / valuations are notoriously all over the place, even in similar places and times, often for reasons that weren't preserved in the historical record.

• OD&D: 3-7× the price depending on weight
• D&D 5e: 8× the price
• J M Davidson's "Universal Price List"*: 46× the price

* Which I remember getting a lot of traction in the TTRPGsphere back in the day

In the Discworld RPG, an "expensive" warhorse is just 2× the price of a draft horse, waaaay at the cheap end of the scale!

The creatures, like the NPCs and the setting guide, are in the necessary-but-not-intrinsically-interesting box for me. By contrast, the final section of this massive book is the juiciest part: the methods for actually running a Discworld RPG game. I write about it here!

On edge cases and magic

There's an innate design tension which RPG magic systems must contend with.

Magic must be more powerful than enacting the equivalent effect by mundane means, otherwise it's not fun and not fantastic. But if it's powerful and its uses are limitless (or at least non-rate-limited), then you become committed to an exceptionally high-magic setting.

If it takes ten seconds to give yourself a magical boon which lasts for ten minutes, the default player behaviour and the reasonable in-world behaviour will be to cast the spell every ten minutes... Unless they have a specific reason not to. That's almost always 'resource management'. In almost ever fantasy TTRPG, magic (whether spells, items, rituals, innate powers, etc) will be powerful and limited, i.e., a valuable resource; something to be conserved for when it will matter. Therefore, players will want to know the exact effect of some magic they might use, so that they can make an informed choice.

And this creates a design tension. How predictable to players is the magic their characters are harnessing?

The predictability predicament

Assuming you want magic to be able to do a huge range of things (it's magic), to get breadth of coverage, you either end up with these huge, minutely-detailed lists of magic effects and parameters (almost certainly player-facing), or you have a fuzzy system where the GM instantiates vague wordings at runtime (possibly via what amounts to negotiation with the player). These game design choices have different costs in terms of usability and satisfaction.

Most big, popular fantasy TTRPGs like D&D go with the huge, minutely-detailed lists of magic effects option. This arguably results in greater player agency, in the sense of being able to make good and meaningful decisions about resource allocation, but it constrains magic to the big official list (and if it's not exceptionally well-designed, you end up with weird codified corner cases and interactions). You also need to know the system really well to be effective as a player or a GM. Finally, there's a risk that presenting in exhaustive detail what is possible strongly implies that anything else isn't possible. You get cases like D&D 5e, where many destructive spells officially don't damage objects because a small subset of them specify that they do.

The fuzzy system option is attractive because it makes magic more 'mysterious' and wild, and thus fantastical. But it can be hard for a GM, especially one who isn't already operating in a "rulings not rules" tradition. But it can also be hard for players to come to terms with, unless either (a) it's the case in-world that a mage never knows exactly what they're going to get when they do some magic (which is flavourful, but risks a poor play experience), or (b) the GM and player together determine what happens when the magic is used. The latter might sound good (an opportunity for collaborative buy-in) or bad ('Mother May I' gameplay). Some GMs are surprised to find that many players hate 'collaborative storytelling exercises' spilling over into their roleplaying games. Either way, it doesn't actually resolve the tension: it's still in the player's best interests to stop and discuss the possible magical effect before they can make an informed choice whether to use their magic.

Variants of the fuzzy system where e.g. the GM has to follow certain rules to come up with a power-level-appropriate instantiation of a spell at run-time are close to being the worst of both worlds: mechanically fiddly but without giving a player enough information to make decisions with, and you just end up building that minutely-detailed canonical list slowly over time.

Resolving the tension

I consider this an open problem. As I've suggested before, I think the best practises are to

• Pick a path and stick with it, rather than mixing up how rigid and predictable the magic system is in different use-cases within the same game; and
• Have an extremely strong, well-thought out metaphysics which either underpins the mechanical design for the minutely-detailed lists option or informs what 'should be the case' for the fuzzy system option.

Food for thought

Here are some questions your magic system must be robust enough to answer, consistently:

If you turn flour to silver dust and mix it into acid, changing it to silver nitrate and creating heat, what happens to the silver nitrate if the spell wears off? What happens to the heat? If the compound is left over, can you reduce it to get silver? Does the resulting silver still count as being magical?

If you turn a pile of stones into loaves of bread and spend a week eating them, what happens to your tissue, the partially-digested bread, and the waste, if the magic ends? Do you die instantly? Does the energy you got from eating disappear?

If you turn a stone into a cat, and that cat eats and sweats and breathes makes waste, then the magic is dispelled, what happens to the bits of world (food and air and water) that got incorporated into the cat's body? Are they in the stone? Do they turn to stone? Can they be turned back? What happens to the cat's sweat and waste and loose hairs and skin particles out in the world? Do they turn to stone? What if the cat was a kitten, and it grew much bigger and older before the spell ended?

Or if the original subject was a mouse rather than a stone, what happens to the cells that changed in its body? Was there a 'mapping' from one mouse cell to multiple cat cells, so that injuries and shed cells and replaced cells carry back over? Do microbial diseases carry back over? Does cancer?

Are all your answers consistent so far?

What happens if you turn someone into a statue and snap their arm off? What about if you turn someone into steel and then temper or anneal the metal? Or take a mould of their body, turn them into ice, melt them, and then refreeze the water in the mould?

What about if you turn a piece of metal into a piece of wood and burn it inside a big tank of air? Does the carbon dioxide turn into a metal oxide? In general, if you heat something up while it's magically transformed and then turn it back, is it still hot? What if you turned something really small into something really big and then it just got slightly warm by soaking up a million times more sunlight than the tiny thing would have?

If you expand a mouse to be the size of a horse and it eats a bucket of oats, what happens to the oats if it turns back? Does it matter whether they've been digested?

If you expand a mouse to be the size of a horse inside a mouse-sized terrarium that a mouse couldn't possibly break but a horse easily could, does the spell work? Does the answer change if the terrarium is nearly horse-sized? What about if you try it on a mouse that's inside a crack in solid rock? Is this meaningfully different from trapping a mouse under a piece of heavy cloth and then expanding it to the size of a horse?

If you cast a spell on a subject, then another one that seems to have the inverse effect (flesh to rock then rock to flesh), do you get back the exact original? If so, why? If not, what happens if only the first spell ends or is dispelled? What if you cast the first spell, then make some orthogonal change to the subject, then cast the second?

What in-universe mechanism decides whether an object counts as meeting the targeting requirements of a spell? Does a spell that works on chairs work on a one-legged stool if the caster doesn't think a one-legged stool is a chair?

Do any of the answers to these questions change depending on whether it's a temporary effect, a dispelled permanent effect, a magically reversed effect, an intrinsic ability of a magical creature, the effect of an item, etc?

Put Flourishes, Fairy Tales, and Folk Beliefs in Your Fantasy World

Something fantasy world builders tend to do is

1. Take some interesting little aesthetic notion, often borrowed from a story, a history book, folklore, or a random generator;
2. Transform it into a fantasy element with thematically appropriate magical properties.

And that's great. But this is a call to sometimes not transform that little notion into actual 'functional' magic!

Earth's history is absolutely crammed full of little details, curiosities, artistic elements, superstitions, taboos, dead-end inventions, beliefs, art forms, and rumours that don't map onto anything impactful/real/important/true. Why wouldn't a fantasy world be similarly overflowing with these?

We live in the information age and people now still believe all sorts of completely preposterous things, not even as a matter of survival or entrenched cultural memory. In a classic pre-industrial fantasy world where the ground state is ignorance, people are going to deal with the great mysterious unknown around them by (a) trying to work out what works, and (b) just making stuff up. Both types of 'information' will be propagated. That's how people work, and the people in your fantasy world should feel like people.

Here's some suggestions.

Superstitions about dangers

Not every supposed way of keeping the monsters away actually does something. How boring would that be? Our world is full of superstitions meant to keep away monsters which don't even exist. That means you should add popular measures against goblins, vampires, spirits, ghouls, ogres, drakes, basilisks, and so on which simply do not work.

Remember: Nobody has enough information to know what's true and what's not. Even if the idea of confirmation bias has been invented in your world, the average uneducated person isn't going to have heard of it, and won't truck with it if they somehow have. Just like the average undereducated person in our world, and again – we're in an information age.

Superstitions about locales

Some places are sacred or taboo because of personal local history, not because of an innately magical nature.

You can have a big old battlefield without ghosts, and deep dangerous pits that aren't bottomless. The holy grove can just be regular holy rather than regularly dispensing miracles. If nobody goes to the place where the wicked Old Master was stoned to death, it doesn't have to be a portal to the realm of punishment, and the place where his sprawling manor was burned doesn't have to be a nightmarish megadungeon.

It's fine if some places work like this. But a world without unfounded local superstitions rings hollow.

Fairy tales, folk lore, and mythology

Here's a list of the world's fairy tales. There are many thousands of them and the list is incomplete. Like the vast majority of information from history, the most fairy tales never survived to pass into the written record. Note that none of these stories, as far as we can tell, are true.

The good news is that there's so many of them, you can just grab a few at random to fling into your own world and nobody's going to be familiar enough with the corpus to tell.

Folklore is deep and broad.

How about this rule of thumb: for every fairytale and mythological creature you put in your fantasy novel or game, add one that's not actually real in-world, just folklore being perpetuated. Fairies are real in the fantasy world, so people there believe in little fluttering proboscidate flingletons, which aren't. The inscrutable sphinx is real, so people believe in the twelve-metre-tall caustic tintosmaum, which isn't.

Religions, creation myths, and philosophy

Without making a claim in any particular direction, if you assume the world's major religious beliefs are incompatible with each other in terms of truth value, then a logical minimum of 5.4 billion people make a false set of beliefs central to their world view. And a possible maximum equal to the world's current population of 7.9 billion.

Now, I'll grant that (again, avoiding particular claims) our world doesn't have fantasy RPG clerics getting their daily allotted three or dozen or thirty verifiable magical miracles. But truth spreads slowly outside the information age. The existence in a fantasy setting of an extremely interventionist real pantheon (if you use that classic TTRPG trope) doesn't actually preclude local worship of a supposedly interventionist fake pantheon. Doubly so if it takes expertise to distinguish clerical magic from other kinds of magic.

It all depends on the nature of your cosmology, but personally I like when deities are standoffish or nonexistent, and weird new cults and religions pop up like mushrooms, and everybody thinks they're worshipping the real god(s) but there's no way, or no practical way, to be really sure. That rings true to me.

Either way, I suggest including some religious ceremonies that don't do anything (except make people feel good and forge stronger community bonds and so on). Religious rites don't have to have direct supernatural outcomes. You don't have to take the D&D route of turning blessings, ceremonies, funeral rites, holy water, holy symbols, etc, into spells and items with practical gameplay effects.

Pseudosciences and fake magics

Things like astrology and alchemy and the system of medieval humours needn't be in-game systems of magic or science. It's fine if you do want to play things that way, because these pseudosciences are flavourful and people have enough familiarity with them that they know what to expect (widespread modern misunderstandings of what 'alchemy' really meant notwithstanding). But if you do, you should definitely invent new pseudosciences for your fantasy people to get caught up in.

Again: People in our world, where magic doesn't exist, have believed in all sorts of magic, on the back of no evidence whatsoever. People in a world where they can occasionally see magic working should be more likely to have their minds open to such things.

That means that alongside pseudosciences, a fantasy world should have 'pseudomagics'. Piscomancy! Rust prevention magic! Soliferrous auras! Longevity rituals! Charms against moths! Whole new fields of supposed arcana! Is that local warlock a low-level magic-user, an ambitious dabbler with exactly one trick, a deliberate con artist, or completely deluded? It should be very difficult for a non-expert to tell.

Our actual history also has tons of objects that people placed significance in and ascribed powers to. Consider for example the 'Sator square' (an acrostic word square in Latin). It puts out fires. It eases childbirth. It cures toothaches. It's the basis for a love potion. It cures aquaphobia. It finds witches. Inscribe it on bread to cure rabies and insanity. Write it in pigeon blood to make a wish come true. Etch it into your fingernails to cure jaundice.

The Sator square obviously doesn't actually do any of those things. But people really believed it did. A fantasy world should have all sorts of things like this.

Terrain features

Our planet is home to lots of remarkable, awe-inspiring geography. In a low-technology world, real-world terrain can be a big challenge. Mountain passes can be extremely deadly because of the low rate of success of people tackling them, not because they're haunted by spirits or dimensionally scrunched or stalked by a gigapredator.

For every fantasy terrain element, include at least a couple of mundane ones.

Rumours

A healthy proportion of rumours should be completely spurious. But from a TTRPG gameplay perspective, don't go overboard. Make sure some rumours are very obviously false, as well as some more subtly false ones.

A neat effect for verisimilitude is to spin up false rumours based on things the player characters did or witnessed.

Flourishes, artworks, and personal styles

A neat little aesthetic detail doesn't have to be enhanced by fantasy (meta)physics.

A company of mercenaries march with a noose instead of a battle standard; it has no magical powers. The local villages have a specialist crop; it doesn't give you temporary hit points or make you levitate or drool blood, it's just funny-coloured pears. A distant monastery teaches a distinct style of martial arts that isn't supernaturally powerful. And some distant monasteries stick to beekeeping, illuminating manuscripts, and overeating.

We know of lots of little artistic embellishments, hoaxes, and weird experiments from pre-industrial history. The Voynich manuscript is a big one. People made sword blades with guns attached (and vice versa) as early as the 1500s. Sure, things like this can be the basis for unique powerful artefacts, but they don't have to be. Some of them should be prototypes that just don't work, or novel weapons that aren't actually as good as well-established ones, or an artist's cryptic drawings of a dream they had, or deliberate hoaxes. The strange, mysterious, whimsical, and exotic doesn't have to be translated into 'it's magic and has purpose X'. People on Earth have made all sorts of strange, mysterious, whimsical, and exotic things; all of them have been mundane, and they have been no less special for that.

Conclusion

To make a fantasy world feel real and lived-in, don't just fill it with fantasy. Remember to add little human-feeling elements from the real world, where pretty often a cigar is just a cigar.

Fantasy pseudo-anachronism part two: Aetheric boogaloo

Following up on yesterday's post, here are some thoughts on pseudo-anachronisms that didn't end up in the main article.

Additions

First, there were a couple of pseudo-anachronisms I had intended to mention. Nice beds with mattresses and pillows are major investments, certainly not something every person owned, even when they're just pallets made from straw sitting on the floor. (If you think a bed is expensive today, consider that it would have been a large fraction of a house's value in many pre-industrial places and times.) Also, inns for travelers to stay in. Inns were only common on major roads, pilgrim and trade routes, and in cities and market towns. The chances of a random village having an inn would be close to zero, even a village in the middle of civilisation. And even in a reputable inn, it would be a luxury to get your own private bed that you didn't have to share with a couple of strangers or traveling companions, let alone getting your own private room!

To have nice beds and pervasive inns in our fantasy world, we need a reason to have a culture of travel, in particular to non-notable destinations. We also need a cheaper way of making sleep furniture – maybe some ancient artefact has been churning beds out at a rate of fifty per day for thousands of years, or maybe there's a widespread plague of puffball pigeons (all feathers and no flesh), or maybe when a domesticated slime dies it dries up into something superficially like a beanbag chair.

Second, reader Lauren suggested the addition of "well-lit rooms after sunset". It's true! If you've tried to light a room with candles before, you've found that candle light is really very weak. Any kind of fire doesn't, uh, hold a candle to electric lighting. Lauren also pointed out that many modern people are used to the ambient light pollution of a big modern city; complete darkness is very disorienting. It's hard to keep your balance standing up in true darkness, let alone move around, but TTRPG rule penalties are often just a slap on the wrist. As with many things, inconvenient truths get handwaved away unless they provide excitement in the game.

I think well-lit rooms at night is particularly common in visual arts and film, where the viewer's ability to see most of the shot is pretty much the most important thing.

So 'convenient modern lighting' is a fantasy pseudo-anachronism. It's one that any number of fantastic technologies could solve (glowing magical crystals, cold-burning lanterns, the ubiquitous luminescent dungeon wall fungi, minor spells and charms, enchanted or holy candles, unusually bright domesticated fireflies, rushlights from the will'o'wisp marshes, whatever). Think carefully before making it a solved problem for the common person, though: clean, cheap, portable, bright light like we have at hand nowadays is a powerful technology. It takes terror away from the night and eclipses and deep dark caves. It drastically changes warfare. It changes sleep patterns and therefore labour patterns and local economies. It removes a constraint that can serve to drive gameplay.

Missing technologies

Rarely, fantasy takes things away from the generic 1300s-to-1600s technological milieu, rather than adding pseudo-anachronistic technologies.

For example, central heating, chewing gum, concrete, contraception, ice skates, and lighthouses were all invented thousands of years ago. I've seen a setting where characters in a snowy town had no way to cross a lake which froze every winter. And there's no excuse for not having a lighthouse guarding the dangerous shoals near a major wealthy port city. Some of the others aren't likely to come up, depending on what kind of ground the fantasy is going to cover.

Complex financial instruments, too, are fairly old (the word "credit" appeared in English in the 1520s, and at the time English-speaking states were economically a bit of a backwater; I don't know much about the history of banking but I would be surprised if continental Europe didn't have entrenched banking and other institutions in centuries prior, and the Islamic world and the East earlier still). I think sometimes TTRPG settings leave out promissory notes, banknotes, loans and interest payments, insurance policies, and so on due to a false perception that these are modern innovations.

The elephant in the room in this regard, of course, is gunpowder. Cannons were widespread in the West from the start of our supposed fantasy technological band, and early man-portable guns were in use well before plate armour reached its apogee. In China and its neighbours, gunpowder had been used for at least five hundred years prior to the period, initially as an incendiary weapon.

There are good reasons for not wanting gunpowder in a setting, reasons which have been discussed to bits. Everyone reaches a different answer to the question (some, possibly, because of misapprehensions imported from modernity about how powerful, fast, cheap, light, or accurate an early gun could be; I personally don't think preindustrial firearms being 'too good' is an adequate reason to exclude them from a fantasy setting). Gygax was notoriously against gunpowder in D&D, going so far as to say that the laws of physics in his fantasy universe were such that chemical reactions were weaker. I don't think that's a great solution, because it's both underspecific and implies weird knock-on effects.

If we want a world where 'black powder' gunpowder was just never invented, is that historically plausible? On the face of it, no. It's three ingredients, of which sulphur is very common in nature, charcoal is an incredibly important part of metalworking technology, and saltpeter can be refined from fairly common mineral deposits or bat guano. Additionally, 'classic' fantasy has early chemist analogues trying things out (I think modern fantasy has sadly transformed the word 'alchemist' to mostly mean 'magic potion-maker', rather than 'a philosopher obsessed with the idea of attaining physical, mental, and spiritual perfection via a mixture of study, experiment, religious ceremony, allegory, chemical means, mystery cults, etc').

But what that argument overlooks is that having access to magic might impede the development of gunpowder weaponry. Early experiments with explosive or incendiary mixtures probably wouldn't have been (a) taken as far, (b) seen as something remarkable, or (c) suggestive of exciting military applications, if two streets over from the workshop was an academy of war wizards suiting up for another day of hurling explosive fireballs, turning city walls to mud, and setting things on fire with their minds. Even assuming magical arts were at the time in their infancy rather than developed, they would have a competitive advantage due to their comparative versatility. So, inverted pseudo-anachronism: Solved.

(Conversely, if you wanted to take it in the other direction, and have gunpowder keep up with or surpass violent forms of magic, a world with fantasy materials might have better ingredients for a propellant. Materials that were more common, cheaper to make, easier to discover, safer to store, produced a more powerful reaction, burned smokelessly, negated the sound of their own explosion, or whatever.)

Pseudo-anachronistic systemic technologies

There were a few technologies I left out of the first article because they are more processes than inventions.

1. Classic fantasy has machines but no factory mass production.

There's an artificer, wright, engineer, or (sigh) 'alchemist' who makes devices. There's steam power, clockwork, waterwheel power, or complex systems of gravity power or compressed springs powering elaborate mechanical traps. There might be non-magical 'automata'. Sometimes it's almost a genre shift into steampunk or clockpunk. Sometimes it's subtle: the dungeon gates open and close with the right series of lever pulls and Detect Magic doesn't turn anything up, but further details about the mechanism aren't forthcoming.

Luckily for our settings, there are major societal factors necessary for factory mass production to flourish. It's not enough to have the idea and the metalworking skill. Labour must be at least moderately expensive (compared to thoroughly pre-industrial eras, not compared to today). There has to be the wealth and systemic control to acquire, move, and stockpile large quantities of raw resources. There must be pretty good ways to transport input and output goods. There must be at least a little hint of standardisation in the cultural zeitgeist. Things must be sufficiently peaceful and stable locally that the wealthy feel confident investing huge amounts of capital starting up a new kind of business whose nature is that it must be continually fed or suffer major costs. And it probably helps if there are enormous costly wars going on in the background to drive both demand and development.

Two thousand years ago, the Ancient Greeks had clockwork, a simple steam engine, and Heron of Alexandria described mechanical automata and a vending machine (a coin-operated mechanical holy water dispenser). But the conditions weren't right for industrialisation: It wasn't Steam Engine Time.

Still, if you want to play it safe, consider adding a rare, non-scaleable magical element to the setting's contraptions (some bit of fantasy metallurgy or alternative physics power source or unique irreplaceable artefact).

2. Classic fantasy implies advanced food production.

My impression of the typical TTRPG fantasy milieu is that even small settlements have great numbers of skilled workers outside the fields of food and textile production. Compare that to almost all preindustrial places and times, where the farmer-to-specialist ratio is somewhere between 90:10 and 99:1. The implication is advanced food production technology, but this is seldom directly shown.

There's two avenues to resolve this. You could say there's an enormous spiderweb of little farming hamlets and fishing villages, mostly ignored by the setting focus, diligently toiling to feed and clothe themselves and send their crop of food or textiles to market to pay their taxes (or send them directly to the tax collector, in less moneyed societies).

Or you could add the milieu-appropriate equivalent of spray pesticides, antibiotics, massive greenhouses, John Deere tractors, chemical fertilisers, advanced irrigation, and GMO crops. Let's say that stirge blood repels all insect larvae, and breaks down into a decent fantasy fertiliser. Water mages harness tiny elementals for drainage and irrigation. Weather witches work the weather. Migrating flocks of giant eagles regularly fix the soil nitrogen. The obsidian bullock pulls a plough slowly, but forever, night and day, without needing to eat or drink. A growthstone is costly, but all plants within two leagues of one grow at twice the rate, so you just have to keep up with the weeding. The peaceful living dead keep birds away for a while before degrading and nourishing the loam. And to cover gaps, the magic temple is happy to dispense endless miracle bread to the sufficiently needy.

3. In classic fantasy, big things don't decay.

Speaking of nourishing the loam... In the real world, everything is subject to entropy. Even stone degrades over time. There are startlingly close to zero stone buildings whose original roofs have stood the test of centuries. Earth settles, tunnels collapse. Most metals corrode. Wood rots or gets eaten, even in the dry. And – you know where I'm going with this – dungeons aren't usually well known for being dry. Ancient megastructures like lost castles and sprawling dungeons are sort of a fantasy anachronism, in that they are basically supernaturally well-preserved archaeological sites. In our world, furnishings and materials in them would be rotten within years, everything mechanical would have completely seized up within decades, the entrances (at a minimum) would get thoroughly sealed by a bunch of debris blowing in, and eventually the structure's integrity would fail.

This is of course no fun. Luckily there are plenty of possibilities. Lingering enchantments. Automata or invisible demons or extensions of the Gygaxian 'cleanup crew' which eat dust and grit and drifts of leaves. Magical materials that don't corrode or rot. Something to bear in mind is that most of these anti-entropy fantasy technologies are going to be valuable to people in the world, so by adding verisimilitude to your dungeons and ancient monuments you are also adding stuff that people are going to want to mine/harvest/tame/imitate and put in their own homes.

4. Classic fantasy makes outdated arms and armours contemporaneous with later ones.

Okay, this is mostly just a pet peeve, but it's close enough to the topic for me to justify cramming it in.

Particularly in the case of armour, your generic fantasy setting offers armours from radically different warfare/civilian contexts (almost always getting the armour itself wrong, but that's another story) as if any of them could be reasonable choices. In practice, people going into battle wore the best armour they could afford, perhaps modulated slightly by considerations of comfort. Let's look at mail vs plate, which is the biggest example (apart perhaps from 'leather armour' which is somehow both protective enough to sometimes be chosen over metal and quiet/fast to move around in; yeesh).

If a setting has the technology, expertise, and capital investment to make plate harness, then a fully protective suit of mail (hauberk including coif + aventail + chausses + gloves etc) is strictly worse than a suit of plate armour: the mail is either heavier or much thinner (because of ring overlap!), and more expensive (it takes more labour to make and rivet the large number of rings than to shape the smaller number of plates, and both are kinds of skilled labour!), and less protective (because mail flexes at points other than the joints!), and no less encumbering (assuming the plate armour is properly made, you can't do yoga in it, but that's about the limit of its limits).

The only advantages you could argue for mail are that it's slightly less hot to wear, due to its breathability (except, it tended to be worn over thicker clothing), and that it's easier to don and doff (definitely true: maybe twenty or thirty times faster, and you don't need assistance from a servant or colleague). Did both mail and plate exist at the same time? Sure; transitional armours increasingly covered the body with plate and retained mail at the tricky gaps (goussets, and then just voiders). Should a setting book place 'full plate' next to 'chain mail' and 'leather clothing armour' as options that just have different tradeoffs? No way.

Can we find a good rationale for having mail hauberks in the same setting as sophisticated high-coverage plate armour? Only, I think, at places and times when expertise in making armour plates is tightly controlled and/or slowly leaking out into the wider world. The only good reason to offer both these armours as reasonable options to player characters is if the massive difference in time to don/doff them is actually going to matter in play, and this must be the way the opportunity cost is framed instead of nonsense like 'plate costs more than mail' or 'plate is heavier than mail'.

This all applies to some extent to weaponry, too: fantasy TTRPGs love big lists of weapons from across many centuries, and some of them ought to be modeled as strict improvements of others. And to weapons platforms, like the chariot, which was thoroughly superseded by horseback riding, but still pops up in fantasy from time to time. Also the galley, which has three core assets (incredible maneuverability, naval ram, and capacity for beach landings) and three core drawbacks (high crew requirement, low cargo capacity, and relative fragility), but I've seen settings which included galley-like ships to evoke an Ancient feel while managing to ignore all of those factors.

Arms and armour are the products of a continuous technological competition – hence the term 'arms race' – and classic fantasy almost never includes what you would actually expect: weapons and armour (and tactics, troop formations, earthworks, etc) that are specifically designed for fighting giant enemies, invisible enemies, winged enemies, hordes of extremely small enemies, enemies that can't be cut or pierced, enemies that are slow but kill with a touch, and so on. Instead, at best, real-world weapons are used against them in novel ways. This is one of the few areas where fantasy actually needs to make more stuff up.

Pseudo-anachronistic societal features

Finally, I'm going to briefly go over a few things that aren't technologies. They're arguably pseudo-anachronistic, but are beyond the main scope of what I've been talking about with and frankly would need a whole series of articles to get into, and touch on topics which deserve a deep and sober treatment. For many of them I also think they could have become widespread features of societies earlier in our history, they just didn't happen to do so.

Actually, in an attempt to rein in my impulse to go on typing for hours, I'll switch to bullet points. These tropes show up in 'classic' fantasy quite often:

• General stores and grocery shops. Pretty modern idea.
• Lots of off-the-shelf products rather than things being custom-made, commissioned, or at least assembled on the spot. Historically, if you wanted to buy a knife, you'd likely visit a blade seller (who sells blades bought from a blade maker), and a hilt maker, and possibly even a separate knife maker to join them together if neither of the first two offered that service, and then you would go somewhere else to get a sheath made for it. If you were rich, you would possibly have any or all of those parts made to your preferences, and then might visit yet another craftsperson specialising in decorations (embellishing, engraving, insetting, etc).
• Civil police forces, or town guards who for some reason serve as constables. Not completely unheard of historically, but you're more likely to run into the local aristocrat's enforcers, or a town militia/guard with strictly military responsibilities, or just three people (a reeve, a coroner, and a magistrate) to be the law system for an entire shire, county, or small fief.
  
• Minor professions inexplicably organised into guilds; guilds that lack a religious/charitable structure; guilds operating like labour unions rather than corporations trying to suppress competition; guilds envisioned by people who learned the word from MMOs; guilds for major military technologies that really ought to be state-controlled... I could go on. I usually just shake my head and assume the word 'guild' is a spotty translation from the invented language the characters are speaking, not meant to bear any relation to the real world.
• The (correct, to be clear) modern perception held by almost all individuals and even by most states that war is bad.
• The notion that a war is likely to be for some abstract goal of 'power' or to extend a ruler's 'reach' rather than for territory and loot. In a world where land equals wealth, a successful war is a financial investment with a huge payoff (things like holy wars, wars of succession, etc, notwithstanding).
• People (correctly, to be clear) being viscerally and morally repulsed by what we now call war crimes and torture 'even' against 'the other side'. It's a depressing reflection of how groups of people operate that this is only a modern concept.
• Modern principles of individual liberty and rights, personal equality, and other individual rights. Anyone with basic knowledge of history knows that these were incredibly hard-earned and we are lucky to mostly now live in societies that have them at least in principle. It's not clear whether fantasy imports these because we're so immersed in them or because it's not fun to play without them.
  
• People living without major societal obligations and without a rigid societal, contractual, or familial relationship with the people ruling them. e.g., vassalage. I think fantasy settings tend to just pay lip service here, because it's not fun to have to bend the knee to your 'betters'.
• Conversely, in some settings, absolute tyranny existing unchallenged. Arguably more historically plausible, but even more plausible would be: the lieutenants and rich vassals think the rulers have far too much power + the rulers think they're giving up too much power and are trying to claw it back + there's a backdrop of masses of poor tenants and peasants desperately trying to get their established rights upheld. See e.g. the Magna Carta.
• (Pseudo-)democracies where everyone is franchised.
• Large numbers of empowered women with equal rights and with societal roles overlapping with those of men (or without distinct societal roles). Again, to be clear, a good thing, but rare historically. I have absolutely no expertise here but I usually see an explanation for how the systemic oppression of women came about that goes [average male physical strength advantage + power derives from strength-based violence + societies were more likely to succeed when the powerful set the rules + people tend to support existing rules (or, successful societies encourage supporting existing rules) → men seize and then hold and maintain power almost exclusively]. The good news is that you can excise this from a fantasy world by having magic more powerful than strength, or by reducing biological differences between the sexes, or by having interventionist gods who support equality, etc.
• More generally, no bigotry, slavery, or systemic prejudice. Sometimes this is because everyday common people are space aliens, by which I mean they aren't under-educated, clannish, selfish, fearful, violent, and ignorant of the wider world. Sometimes people are portrayed plausibly but intolerance magically doesn't happen at a wider scale. There are good and obvious reasons not to want bigotry in your setting or to confront it in your games, but (and now this list is just making me sad) pervasive intolerance has historical verisimilitude. Yeesh. How about we say that the fantasy world's populations are massively cosmopolitan, driven by ancient diasporas of hundreds or preferably thousands of peoples; everyone looks different to each other, even very locally, and innumerable culture are constantly blending. Or maybe we resort to magical divine intervention again to fix things.
• Speaking of which, there's the trope of 'everyone's religious beliefs are strictly compatible'. In a classic TTRPG fantasy, the gods definitely exist, everyone agrees on what they're like, everyone mostly agrees on their names, most people worship a single god even though there's a pantheon, and nobody is erroneously worshipping a god who doesn't provably (or provably doesn't) exist. This has always been quite funny to me. Maybe I'll write an article about interesting alternatives.
• Immortality as a desideratum only of evildoers (e.g., liches and sorcerer-kings). Likely imported from major modern religions; I don't think many nonreligious people are keen to grow old and die. The trope is kind of compatible with there provably being a good afterlife, but that's not always the case in a fantasy world, especially when you're not one of the tiny number of people with a divine magic pipeline.
  

There we go. If you think I missed any notable pseudo-anachronism, leave a comment!

Lockpicking! Windows! Maps! Burning oil! The concept of fantasy pseudo-anachronism!

Let's look at pseudo-anachronistic technologies in fantasy fiction (with a TTRPG lens as usual, but I think this also mostly applies to other media).

When Arneson invented the first fantasy roleplaying game, he incorporated numerous science fiction elements. This could be viewed as weird rough edges of what would bloom into the greater hobby, but it was also a product of the concurrent boom era of pulp fantasy and pulp science fiction. Most people coming to D&D and its burgeoning successors could be assumed to have an interest in those kinds of stories. Science fiction aspects (machines, martians, rayguns, etc) stayed in early D&D and the emerging fantasy TTRPG traditions for a while before dying off and it's easy to imagine an alternative pathway where that was the default today. In reality though, in contrast to these roots, 'classic' fantasy is now regarded as a set of tropes which include a setting's technology conforming to a certain band of real-world history and geography.

Interestingly, those tropes are imperfect: they deviate from that implied band of technology in a few particular ways.

Pseudo-anachronism: Or, how we can "know" that Elrond doesn't own a skateboard

What do I mean by 'pseudo-anachronism'? Well, just 'anachronism' doesn't work; it's a word that only applies to historical real-world settings. It's Ancient Romans wearing wax lips and wristwatches. It's Kamakura shoguns carrying shotguns and sherrif badges.

'Anachronism' doesn't apply to fantasy worlds. But there are 'classic' fantasy tropes: default values, as it were. Many settings are designed as if they mostly conformed to certain real-world historical settings, so that players' brains automatically fill in the gaps of what 'ought' to be there. And to drill down into 'certain real-world historical settings', classic generic fantasy tends towards vaguely Late Middle Ages or Renaissance European pastiche. (There's an argument that this particular imagined pseudo-historical window represents a drift towards a later period from the initially D&D roots which blended pseudo-Arthurian jousting-and-castles with Hyborian Age ancient sword-and-sorcery, but nowadays that 1300s-to-1600s Western European default is quite strong in stodgy 'classic' fantasy.) Game masters and players alike will tend to fill in any blanks with what they understand to be a pre-industrial technology level beginning at clocks and the three-field system and ending at huge ruff collars. Then add to the mix a melange of societal assumptions drawn from modernity and pop history, seemingly divorced from available technologies.

So in a 'classic' fantasy implied setting, there is an expectation of a certain tech level. If it turns out that, say, consumer plastics exist, players won't think "oh, these people happen to have plastics technology". They'll think "huh, I wonder what unique magic is producing plastics". Or more cynically, "huh, that's stupid and immersion-breaking."

Nowhere in Tolkien's corpus does he write that Elrond doesn't own a skateboard. And yet we can confidently state that to be true. That's the essence of pseudo-anachronism.

Nerdbait The curse of knowledge

If you're like me, then when you know a topic well, it's grating to see it portrayed badly in fictive media. It may even feel like the more you know about a subject, the worse and more common this problem is, and the natural/cynical conclusion is that pretty much all media only ever gets things right on accident but you're only equipped to notice it when it happens within your domains of interest.

I've certainly found that some of my interests (historical technologies) have ruined some quite major media works for me. Fortunately in the case of my favourite hobby (fantasy TTRPGs), all you need to do is work out what's bothering you and then tweak the world (in self-consistent, verisimilitudinous ways) so that it actually makes sense within the setting.

It's nice when things are self-consistent. And it helps at the table, because players appreciate it when things hang together, too:

Every time players discover that some part of their fantastical world is more logical and organized than they’d given it credit for, their faith in the quality of the GMing, strength of the worldbuilding, and reach of the GM’s imagination surge forward. They’re more inclined to think themselves about how the game fits together–they’re more inclined to think about what NPCs would do, about how the gameworld will react, than plan in mechanical and metagame terms.

(From a slightly older article but a short one worth checking out if you're into cases of fantasy verisimilitude)

Individual pseudo-anachronistic technologies

So, we're left with a question: what kind of stuff "shouldn't" be in the vaguely Late Middle Ages / Renaissance European default setting of 'classic' Western fantasy? Let's take a look at five common pseudo-anachronisms and, rather than just flagging them for removal, come up with some in-fantasy-world reasons to justify allowing them.

Modern locks and skilled lockpickers

For many people, Skyrim or something like it is the archetypal fantasy 'locks and lockpicking' experience. You (1) pop in a torsion tool to keep pressure on the barrel, (2) apply your skill to fiddle around with a lockpick in the keyway, and (3) the lock opens. This is also implied in the fiction of most fantasy TTRPG/novel settings: the roguish character needs both the necessary skills, and the sophisticated tools, to pick a lock.

Here's the problem: skill-based lockpicking with clever tools is really only necessary to subvert a specific kind of lock, which I will call a 'modern pin tumbler lock'. It's a tumbler with a stack of pins whose variable height at the shear line and rotating barrel mean that pins must be set to the exact height that the key is designed to lift them to. And it's a kind of lock that was only invented, and entered use, in the late 1800s.

Earlier locks were of two main types. First, there were ancient pin-based locks, but their pins couldn't be lifted 'too high'. Even a well-designed one could be defeated easily by putting a bent rod or stick in the keyway and pushing all the pins up. (A poorly-designed one that didn't protect the pins could be defeated in a single motion by putting anything in the keyway.) You could completely master subverting old pin locks in well under an hour, and you don't need special tools for it.

The second type, and the best lock technology for thousands of years, was a warded lock. This has complex 'wards' (metal shapes) meant to prevent the wrong key turning in it. A warded lock can be defeated by a skeleton key (a filed-down regular key). Picking a warded lock therefore amounts to using a big bundle of 'tryout keys' and if they failed, trying various bent rods until one was the right shape to move the latch or bolt. Again, lockpicking before the advent of the modern pin tumbler doesn't require much skill, so we have a pseudo-anachronism.

We'd like huge fiendish fantasy traps and complicated locking mechanisms with poison needles artfully hidden in them and cunning thieves with bundles full of specially-made picks, though. So can we say that a modern pin tumbler lock could have been invented in a much earlier technology level?

The idea for the modern pin tumbler doesn't seem like the tricky part. Ideas can be justified as coming from anywhere at any time. The little springs in the key stack might be tricky, as is the overall complexity of the mechanism. You need (1) good metallurgy (so bits don't break or bend), (2) fine engineering tolerances (so bits don't fail or jam), and (3) good manufacturing processes (so the key actually works and the lock doesn't have other security flaws). You also arguably need to keep the skilled labour cost down, at least to the point where wealthy people with things they want secured might invest in a lock instead of a magical solution. I think all of these are within striking distance of your classic fantasy world, as are the more epic extensions to huge fantastic locks, trapped locks, etc. In particular, the setting likely has supernaturally clever people with small fingers and an affinity for metalwork - gnomes and/or dwarves.

There's also an alternative. Maybe nobody's invented the modern pin tumbler lock, but there's still skill-based lockpicking, because fantasy metallurgy allows for entirely new types of lock. Fantasy loosens the constraints on the laws of physics: we can imagine particular metals that can pass through each other to a certain depth, mechanisms that magically seize up in the presence of common key metals, enchantments that are sensitive to the colour of things that get put in the keyway, and so on. Lockpicking could be a massively skill-based art without the actual locks being very mechanically advanced!

Large glass panes

Many classic fantasy settings 'get this right' but others don't. In general, a window in the form of a sheet of glass large enough to look through, and clear and flat enough to identify what you're seeing on the other side, requires modern technology.

Up until the 1800s, glass panes were distorted rather than properly flat, and not very transparent. They were also more brittle than modern glass, both chemically and because of inclusions and bubbles that weakened it even further. On top of all that, glass was expensive to make! So shutters and curtains were preferred in most buildings, in most places and times (certain cathedrals, palaces, etc notwithstanding).

There were a few methods of making 'flat' glass, mostly based on blowing a globe or tube, flattening it on a metal plate, then cutting it up (crown glass and broad sheet glass). These made for translucent or semi-opaque pieces, not transparent ones, usually riddled with imperfections and distortions. You could grind the best ones down into 'blown plate glass', which would be finer quality and even smaller. To make a window out of the little panes that a glassmaker could produce, you would make 'leadlights', setting a large number of small pieces into a lead (or occasionally ceramic) lattice.

In the late 1600s, 'polished plate glass' was a slight improvement that could make larger and higher quality glass panes by casting glass on a metal surface and then grinding it down, but it was even more costly to produce.

It wasn't until the late 1800s that broad sheet methods were developed into 'cylinder blown sheet' glass which could make larger panes, albeit ones that needed grinding and polishing. From this point, glass could be used as a building material (and became popular after its use in the Crystal Palace of 1851). To get true modern large glass window panes you need the 'float glass' method (molten glass poured onto large baths of molten metal, taking the form of long flat ribbons, gradually cooled and rolled off at the other end). So, nice big windows are a pseudo-anachronism.

The good news: it's possible to make large glass panes using relatively simple metallurgy, hot furnaces, and a truly enormous capital investment. My amateur view is that the fact we didn't get the technology until the 19th Century can be considered an accident of history. In a fantasy world that has glassworkers, metalworkers, and their extremely wealthy patrons, it should be doable, either at incredible decadent kingly expense, or with the help of magic.

Common use of accurate maps

We all know what a map is. A simplified top-down image of a place at a certain scale showing natural and constructed features positioned correctly with regard to their actual positions in space for use as a key tool of navigation and planning. Right? Well, no, that's a modern lens. Many early maps are some combination of (a) allegorical, (b) valuable art pieces for display, (c) neither top-down nor to scale, (d) extremely inaccurate. Despite being ubiquitous in the modern day, reading a top-down map or even understanding what a map means is a learned skill, and not trivially so. Don't expect pre-industrial people to be able to purchase a map, read one, or know what one is.

Cartography generally started out as maps 'of the world', produced by philosophers and scholars to chart what they knew about their universe and/or so their wealthy and powerful patrons could show off. Later, there were maps of territories, and early sea charts. Eventually, local maps of property boundaries were made for gentry, lawyers, and courts.

High-quality terrain maps were only made pretty late in history, driven by demand from military commanders for increased information as the nature of warfare changed. Using maps at all for the purposes of military planning is a recent phenomenon: even though it seems absolutely intrinsic to us now, ancient military commanders and most pre-industrial ones didn't use them at all.

It must be emphasised that people just didn't think in terms of top-down map-like views like we do. Navigation was landmark-based. The central navigational tool for armies was knowledge of the network of known major roads and locally-known minor roads and paths, i.e., institutional knowledge plus scouts and local guides. Not maps. The central navigational tool for civilian travelers was itineraries (codified routes between multiple settlements, usually major cities / ports / pilgrimage destinations), i.e., written or memorised lists of directions, supplemented with asking locals. Not maps. At most you might see sketch images of some terrain features you were navigating by, or a lengthy itinerary might be written on top of a crude map of the continent as illustrative backdrop.

Maps (as local navigation aids) could have been an extremely useful tool for pre-industrial merchants, sailors, military commanders, property owners, and explorers, and yet, they for the most part neither made them nor used them nor understood the idea. (To that list of occupations we might add: dungeon delvers.)

detailed topographical maps of the sort that hikers today might rely on remained rare deep into the modern period, especially maps of large areas [...] Getting lost in unfamiliar territory was thus a very real hazard. Indeed, getting lost in familiar territory was a real hazard

- ACOUP

But there's so much map-heavy fantasy media that it permeates our vision of the past! I think "fantasy=maps" because (a) a map makes a great visual, (b) Tolkien casts a long shadow, and (c) we end up importing all kinds of modern assumptions. Nevertheless, regular people having access to accurate maps and the skills to read them? As remarkable as it seems, probably pseudo-anachronistic. Here's a crude compressed history (drawn from Wikipedia and some AskHistorians threads like this one):

1200s: First maps for ship navigation (portolan charts). Mostly useful for particular known routes, required a good compass, and weren't much use in working out where you were if you ended up far off course. Note that adequately mapping inland regions is much more difficult than coastlines: travel is both slower and more difficult, there are more features to include on the map, and parts of the terrain are inaccessible or obscured by other parts.

Late 1400s: Latitude starts being measured for the purposes of navigating ships. Longitude is vastly more difficult to measure. Explorers like Duarte Pacheco Pereira (1460-1533) make charts and depict parts of coastlines, but as a supplemental part of a highly text-based, descriptive approach to navigation aids.

Early 1500s: Latitude information starts being included on maps, at least for ship navigation.

1500s: First accounts of battles and larger-scale military movements being planned using maps, as reasonable quality land maps start to become available. See e.g. '[Duke] Cosimo studies the taking of Siena' (set in 1553 and painted ten years after), whose subject uses compasses on a map supplemented by a visual depiction of the city.

1600s-1700s: Land maps slowly become more widespread, but far from ubiquitous; the average person definitely cannot read one and the average military commander may or may not be able to. Local usable maps are mostly 'cadastral' maps, i.e., depictions of the legal boundaries, areas and dimensions of particular properties and territories.

Late 1700s: Longitude can finally be reliably measured for the purposes of navigating ships.

Early 1800s: Government-directed surge of high-quality, detailed cartography for military purposes starts in Prussia. This is probably in reaction to a perception that Napoleon's military successes were information-driven. Something like the modern capacity for (and importance of) topographic map-making and map-reading finally starts to be promulgated across Europe (but still only for soldiers). The perceived importance of knowing the terrain is possibly spurred by some other big-picture changes in warfare like army size, logistics and railroads, the role of artillery, speed of battle, etc.

Mid 1800s: Reliable chronometers become common equipment on ocean-going ships; it is finally the era of both making and using good sea maps.

So, 'owning a map and knowing how to read it' is a pseudo-anachronistic fantasy trope unless you're a learned scholar with an interest in philosophy, a lawyer with an interest in property boundaries, or a wealthy lettered ruler with an interest in territorial boundaries - at least until the Renaissance and Early Modern periods, and even then, the list only expands to 'ship navigators' and 'military commanders'.

Whoof! Well, everyone loves maps, so what's the solution? Fortunately, (a) we can give pretty much any fantasy world a history of large armies and sorcerous or monstrous powers mimicking the role of Napoleonic armies as a driver for accurate cartography, and (b) there's probably already magical flight (and/or scrying capable of mimicking a satellite view). Having a mage with a view from high off the ground means having someone who can make accurate maps without the base of sophisticated mathematics and laborious surveying technologies which you'd otherwise need. In a world where flight or distance viewing is 'cheap', we can expect this to be done just out of scholarly interest and/or for the benefit of local rulers and wealthy patrons, so we don't even need maps to be warfare-driven. Pseudo-anachronism solved!

Metal doodads

Metal is a wonder material. It comes in many different kinds with many different properties, and the tools you can make from it are harder/lighter/more durable/sharper edged/etc. Metal is also precious. In our world, at least, most of the useful stuff is tied up in minerals: iron is abundant but a hassle to smelt from ore, and other base metals are either less abundant than iron, much softer, or both.

A couple of historical notes.

First, I discovered while writing this that doorknobs were only invented in 1878. That's top of my personal list of 'new technologies you would have expected Shakespeare to be familiar with'!

Second, threaded screws are fairly old technology, but they had to be hand-made. High-quality threading of the kind you can reliably join a nut to only came about with 'swaging tools' in the 1850s, so nuts and bolts should be considered modern. In general, early woodworking preferred skilled joinery over nails (because iron was expensive and nails had to be individually made), and in turn preferred nails over wood screws (because it's a nail plus a bunch of incredibly meticulous skilled labour cutting a thread into it). Fantasy carpenters, take note.

This is minor stuff, barely even pseudo-anachronistic, and I think is pretty much covered by the discussion of locks and glass above. Nobody's actually going to be thrown out of the flow if you mention doorknobs. You can also change things up by having useful metals be naturally more prevalent in your fantasy world without even getting into 'standing portals to the elemental plane of iron' and so on.

Explosively flammable lamp oil

Here's a classic fantasy trope: you toss the lantern onto the cobbles and it WHUMPHS into a fireball. You douse the monster in lamp oil and one strike of a torch turns it into barbecue. Fantasy oil is not merely combustible but wildly flammable!

The pseudo-anachronism is obvious if you have a basic knowledge of materials science: pre-industrial people weren't using volatile substances with low flash points for everyday lighting, cooking, and heating. They were using plant oils (mostly olive oil) and animal fats (mostly fish oil or whale oil). To make torches and candles, add pitch, resin, beeswax, and tallow to the mix.

None of those things burn by themselves if you touch a flame to them. All of them have to be heated up a lot before they will catch fire and stay burning, except in the case where they're serving as the fuel for a burning wick.

(Read these three articles and the comments on them for a more full treatment of the topic with regards to original D&D)

To have lamp oil catch like petrol it has to actually be, well, petrol (or something like it). Again, there is no overlap between 'things you can make a room-temperature incendiary weapon from' and 'pre-industrial materials used for domestic fires'. Even when you refine petroleum, you produce some fractions with a low enough flash point to ignite and burn even on a cold day (petrol, notably), but you also get a bunch of other fractions whose flash point is too high (diesel, kerosene, and jet fuel don't burn at room temperature and pressure - you'd have to stop and boil your 'lamp oil' over a fire for a while before throwing these ones).

Alternatively, I guess you could burn particular alcohol distillates, like ethanol, in your lamp. If you had more money than Midas and no fear of fire.

Now, technologies to refine rock oil and distill alcohol were discovered a long time ago, well within the classic fantasy setting era, but these low flash point substances are very labour- and resource- intensive to produce by hand. If you want old timey incendiary grenades on your equipment list, they have to be made of something other than 'lamp oil' and multiple orders of magnitude more expensive than it. There's a few more caveats: early incendiary weapons (e.g., 'Greek fire') seem to have been delivered by catapult or huge portable siphon more often than thrown vessels, seem like they were difficult to wield safely and reliably, and were a state secret. All those objections can be overcome by adding a new fantasy material that works as an incendiary, of course. Fire weapons are cool and well-entrenched in the genre, so I say go for it.

I like the idea of combining the two classic fantasy thrown weapons – holy water and flammable oil – as a single plausible substance. My pick for the 'holy fire' weapon is ethanol: it burns with a mysterious smokeless flame that is very faint and blue, it can be poured on wounds to stop them suppurating, and the incautious imbiber is struck with euphoria, visions, and sometimes a debilitating curse. It's an old technology but costly to get your hands on (because it has to be distilled by a learned sage, using up valuable farm produce in the process). And the concept of extremely evil monsters having a specific vulnerability to 'smokeless flame' is just as cool as the well-trod and curiously Christianity-centric concept of them being harmed by blessed water.

And then also

So that's my notes on resolving pseudo-anachronisms for specific individual technologies in classic fantasy settings.

Now available: Part 2, a scattering of addenda on missing technologies, systemic technologies, and societal features!